'It's childish': Americans in Canada react to Trump's renaming of Lake Ontario

Ben Davis, a retired law professor, said Trump’s executive order to change the lake’s name is “so beneath the office of the United States president.” 

“And obviously it’s another one of his distractions of the day, but it’s just pitiful,” Davis said.

He is a permanent Canadian resident who moved from Virginia in February 2025 and has since been living in Quebec, where his wife is from. 

Davis noted that Lake Ontario was mentioned by that name in the 1794 Canandaigua Treaty, signed by the first U.S. president George Washington and the Six Nations after the American Revolution. Renaming it more than 230 years later is nothing short of “nonsense,” he said. 

“The name was good enough for George Washington and I don’t see why it’s not good enough for Donald Trump.”

More than a million Americans, including visitors on long-term visas and dual citizens, live in Canada, according to 2023 estimates from the Association of Americans Resident Overseas.

Dawna E. Wade, who lives with her wife in Annapolis Royal, N.S., is among those who see Trump going after Lake Ontario’s name as plainly ridiculous. 

“It’s not his to rename,” she said. “And even if it were in the purview of the United States, he doesn’t get to do it unilaterally.”

Trump signed the order to change the name as tensions between the United States and Canada escalated following a breakdown in trade talks, and after the president and Ontario Premier Doug Ford traded insults over tariffs. The executive order only holds water in the United States, and has been widely dismissed in Canada. 

Ford and Prime Minister Mark Carney have said the large body of water shared between the two countries will always be known as Lake Ontario, regardless of what Trump calls it.

A recent Ipsos/Reuters poll suggested the lake renaming was not popular within the United States either, with only 14 per cent of roughly 1,000 Americans surveyed countrywide saying they supported the move.

For Wade, distancing herself from America is about much more than geographical names.

She said she and her wife moved to Canada from North Carolina in May because they didn’t feel safe in the United States anymore due to their sexual orientation, their Jewish faith and left-leaning politics. 

Wade, who is a Canadian citizen by descent, was born in Los Angeles and spent most of her life in the United States. She said she had visited Canada only a few times before making the final move. Her wife, however, had never been in Canada.

The transition has been smooth, she said. 

“We have been not only welcomed, but truly embraced. People are not only kind, but they are helpful,” she said. “I don’t know that I had any expectations before we moved, but our experience has far surpassed anything that I could have imagined.”

Chris Palermo, an American who lives in Hamilton with his Canadian wife, called the Lake Ontario name change a “useless” knee-jerk reaction by Trump after he failed to get what he wanted at the negotiating table. 

He said he is more disappointed in Google and Apple for changing the lake’s name on their maps for U.S. users.

Palermo, who moved from Long Island, N.Y, three years ago, said he has noticed that support for Trump’s “outrageous, outlandish actions” is diminishing rapidly even among his hard-core supporters amid a high cost of living made worse by trade disputes and the United States’ war with Iran. 

Palermo said moves such as renaming Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario could also be part of a strategy to divert attention from the Trump administration’s domestic failures. 

“Every time there is a groundswell of opposition to the Epstein files, the war in Iran, affordability, et cetera, something outrageous has to happen to take that approach away,” he said. 

In addition to waging a trade war, Trump has also repeatedly threatened Canada’s sovereignty and mused about the country becoming the “51st state.” 

London, Ont., resident Chris Kubinski said he was so outraged by those threats of annexation that he decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship and “divorce” Trump’s America.

“Literally when he started talking about the 51st state, ‘Canada’s not a country,’ all that negative rhetoric, I just kind of went, ‘That’s it, I’m done,’” he said. 

Kubinski moved to Canada with his family in the 1970s when he was a child, and later married a Canadian woman with whom he raised a family. He became a Canadian citizen two years ago.

As for Trump’s Lake Ontario renaming order, Kubinski said “it’s childish. It’s bizarre.”

“I’m actually surprised he didn’t try and name it ‘Lake Trump,’ because he likes to put his name on absolutely everything,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 6, 2026.